numbersix

well there's a thing, had to reboot my FreeBSD box thismorning after the webcollage screensaver broke it quite badly. been noticing problems with it since i started using it, temporary disk space filling. not sure why it needs so much, seems as though all it needs to do is blit images to the screen, what does it need all that disk space for? it's written in perl, so next project after finishing the publishing interface to this log is to take a look at either fixing it, or writing my own version. such a nice screen saver module too, sorta like the screen saver version of surfbot.

happy birthday dad :)

if you look at the front page of numbersix.net with a recent version of mozilla you'll see a rather crudely drawn little graphic next to the url. cool :)

writing bourne shell scripts, want to check for existance of command line params. try [ -z $1 ] which should tell me if the first command line param is empty. however all i get is "test: argument expected" when the param is not there. no good. annoying. discover bourne shell has a reserved var for the number of arguments passed, looking much like perl's - $#. so accomplish it by a simple [ $# -ne 1]. simple when you know how.

switched to the mozilla email client after i'd finally had enough of pine. pretty impressed so far, i like the quick and simple filter dialog, the screen format etc. nice :)

the first log entry using the new automated system. about time...

just figured out the box this website is on runs under PST. that's not right. will have to adjust the time stamp. ..... there that should do it.

to switch to console after starting xwindows - CTRL-ALT-F2. to get back to xwindows - CTRL-ATL-F9

Scientists were excited this week at having isolated a brief sound which occurred immediately before the Big Bang. Apparently, the sound was, 'uh oh'.

ping can return error codes, useful for scripting, as in:
#Solaris:
$ ping (ip)
#FreeBSD:
$ ping -c (ip)
$ echo $?

i really, really must fix this blog system to handle > and < properly

beware that on some secured unix machines the .forward mechanism seems to have changed. instead of putting the file in ~/.forward you need to put it :

/usr/local/forward/.forward.USERNAME

make sure you check /etc/mail/sendmail.cf

Casimir Funk, what a cool name. AND he discovered vitamines.

at last someone has come up with a name for that state of decay that your OS slips into the older and more used it gets : cruft. windows machines seem to suffer more than others.

i think i'll re-design this site. decided i don't like the front page menu thing, going to try and fit it all on one page, blog down the middle, links to other stuff at the sides. not an original idea by any means, but it seems to work well for other sites. been reading other blogs recently, particularly dutchbint. excellent stuff, and great design.

Odeon - Fanatical About Film. Really? Book over the internet, queue 20 minutes for the ticket, 1 machine in 4 working, queue 10 minutes for loo, then an other 10 minutes for extortionately priced pop corn - utter rubbish. And while I'm on the subject, what's with the 'Powered By Empire' web site? I thought Empire was supposed to be an independent, un-biased magazine?

sorry Sylpheed but Mozilla's email client is back on the desktop. just a bit too klunky for my tastes, and the filtering didn't seem to work particularly well.

maybe i should just try movable type instead of trying to find time to attach the database to the back of this blog...

first entry in my new moveable type blog. reasonably painless so far....

very interesting article over at OReilly on Swarm Intelligence.

well, with a healthy dose of perl, a sprinkling of SQL and more than a little luck I seem to have moved the old blog into moveable type. just got to edit all the titles now...

Again an idea that comes to me in a blinding flash of genius, and someone has beaten me to it. Not that surprising this time though - a library of useful regular expressions. Not quite how I would have done it, but useful none the less.

there aren't enough lists on the internet. so in an effort to rectify this situation I have posted a list of London Underground Stations, correct as far as I know. expect more lists as and when...

This is really good - The Vice Guide to Everything.

In an effort to rid my blog off all the comment spam I mistyped some SQL and blew all the comments away. Bugger. Sorry :( Will turn off comments until I can get round to figuring out a good way of preventing spam.

In an effort to rid my blog off all the comment spam I mistyped some SQL and blew all the comments away. Bugger. Sorry :( Will turn off comments until I can get round to figuring out a good way of preventing spam.

Driftnet is a little toy that sniffs images from network traffic and displays them on the screen. Neat idea I came across a while back, but until recently I've always been on switched networks so it doesn't make much sense. There is even a FreeBSD port for it. Would make a nice screen saver. Now to try it out :)

Incredible page of photos from Tehran, the captial of Iran. I bet there's not many people outside Iran that could say they expected it to look so modern.

Stop Firefox loading a page based on your clipboard contents on middle mouse click:

In about:config set middlemouse.contentLoadURL to false.

This sounds silly, but it's been driving me nuts. I use the middle button to paste, and if you don't happen to have a text box in focus at the time you can loose whatever you've been entering into the rest of the form.

From:

http://aymanh.com/archives/2006/01/27/firefox-and-middle-click-clipboard-url

So, brand new server, and finally brand new blog, but with existing entries! The previous platform was running on Linux with mySQL, new platform is FreeBSD with PosgreSQL. I fiddled around a bit doing an export of the mySQL data and trying to import it into the PostgreSQL tables, but between the two versions of Movable Type the table structure has changed, and it proved to be more work than I had anticipated.

I then stumbled across Movable Type's export/import facilities. This worked except that in the original blog there were a number of entries with 0000/00/00 dates. The new version of MT doesn't like this, so I had to make up a date for these entries. So far so good, I now had the data in the new blog, rebuilt the site and everything was looking good.

However I then realised that the archive system has been changed, the old one relied on the database row ID given to the entry which has changed in the import into PostgreSQL. Added to this, the order changed because of the date problems. This meant that the search engine hits on the old archive entries weren't working any more. Thought about trying to reorder the row IDs to match the old ones, but there were too many differences for this to have worked well. Ended up writing some Perl to parse the old entries, match them with the new ones and then create symlinks between the two. Seems to have worked!

All this, and having to deal with a 5 month old at the same time! Are my talents limitless I ask myself :)

Managed to write a small perl script to convert opml (output from iTunes) to readable HTML. Thus I now have my podcast subscription list available on the web site:

http://www.numbersix.net/cgi-bin/decode_opml.cgi

Needs tidying up, but it's a start.